It didn’t make sense. He was sure it still had a full charge, or close to it. He tried a force restart. Nothing.
He pressed the glass face to his brow and begged it psychically to be good to him, to remember how well he’d treated it over the years. Then he patiently tried again.
Nope.
He stared at it, his eyes dry and sore, hating Steve Jobs, hating his phone service carrier.
“This is not fair,” he told the useless brick of black glass in his right hand. “You don’t get to just die. Why would you just stop working?”
The reply he heard in his mind came not in his own voice but in the voice of jumpmaster Axe: What the hell, man? We just stall out? And Lenny the pilot’s reply: I don’t know! Everything just died.
A bad thought began to take shape. Aubrey had a Shinola watch, a Christmas gift from his mother, a thing with a leather strap and honest-to-God moving hands. It didn’t have apps, didn’t connect to his phone, didn’t do anything except look good and tell the time. Aubrey pushed back the sleeve of his jumpsuit to stare at it. The hands read 4:23. The second hand wasn’t moving. He stared at the watch face without blinking until he was convinced the minute hand wasn’t moving either.
The cloud had done something to the Cessna when they flew over it. It emitted some kind of electromagnetic force that could zap the battery in a light aircraft, or a watch, or a smartphone.
Or a GoPro camera.
The idea was so woeful he wanted to shout in dismay. The only thing that stopped him was fatigue. Shouting up here in the cool, dry air seemed like a lot more effort than he could manage.
He saw clearly now: No one was going to upload a video of him lost on an island of cloud, a Robinson Crusoe of the sky. He was not going to go viral. News helicopters were not going to crowd around the man who walked in the heavens. If they got close, their cameras would record nothing and the helicopters would drop like cement blocks. But no one was going to come, because his jumpmaster’s helmet cam had fried along with the battery under the plane’s hood. The video might have recorded a few unpleasant minutes of Aubrey growing nauseated with anxiety, but it had certainly lost power well before they took the plunge.
The unfairness of it toppled him. He dropped heavily onto his rear, arms crossed over his knees. But even just sitting up required too much effort. He curled on his side, going fetal. Clouds puffed and settled around him. He decided to shut his eyes and wait awhile. Maybe when he opened them, he’d discover he had passed out before even getting on the plane. Maybe if he took deep breaths and rested, when he next lifted his head there would be green grass beneath him and concerned faces—Harriet’s among them—bent over him.
It was just cool enough to make him a tiny bit uncomfortable. At some point, nestled in a soft, slightly elastic nest of cloud stuff, he reached out absently, found the corner of a blanket, drew a thick quilt of churning white smoke across his body, and slept.
6
THERE WAS ONE GOOD MOMENT, just as he woke, when he didn’t remember any of it.
He gazed into a bright, clean sky, and he felt that the world was a kind place. His thoughts turned naturally to Harriet, as they often did when he first awoke. Aubrey liked to imagine rolling over and finding her beside him. He liked to imagine her bare back, the sharp, clean lines of her shoulder blades and spine. It was his favorite morning thought.
He rolled over and looked out across barren cloud.
The shock of it jolted through him, knocked the lazy, rested, in-no-rush-to-get-up feeling right out of him. He sat up and found he was in a large bed, a four-poster shaped out of white cotton. Blankets of creamy smoke had been pushed down around his waist. Pillows of vanilla custard were mounded beneath his head.
His coatrack kept a lonely watch a few feet away, helmet and harness dangling where he’d left them.
It was close to dusk now. The red coal of the sun stood off to the west, almost level with him. His shadow stretched to the far edge of the cloud island. The shadow of the bed was harder to see, a shadow cast by a ghost.
He did not give the bed much thought, not then. It was like the coatrack, just on a larger scale, and at the moment he was still too drowsy to manage much in the way of amazement. He slipped from under the blankets and crossed to the trailing edge of the island, keeping only about four feet between himself and the drop.
The country below was drenched in crimson glare. The green fields were shading to black. He did not see the runway, did not recognize any of what was below him. How fast was the cloud moving? Fast enough to have left the headquarters of Cloud 9 Skydiving Adventures far behind. He was surprised, and also surprised at his surprise.
Aubrey studied the darkening map of Ohio below. Or at least he assumed it was still Ohio. He saw forest. He saw ruddy rectangles of sun-roasted earth. He saw aluminum roofs flashing in the dying furnace light of the day. He spotted the broad, dark stroke of a state highway almost directly below, but who knew which one it might be?
He thought he was still being carried north and east, at least based on where the sun was going down. What was ahead? Canton? They might’ve skirted by Canton while he dozed. He couldn’t even begin to estimate how fast the cloud was moving, not without some way to keep time.
It unnerved him, looking over the edge of the cloud. With the help of a therapist, Dr. Wan, he’d made good progress, had come to feel he was well past his fear of heights—one of a dozen neurotic anxieties she’d been working on with him. At the end of their sessions, she would push open her office window and they’d both stick their heads out to peer at the sidewalk six stories below. For a long time, he could not look without being nearly overcome by vertigo, but eventually he got to the point where he could nonchalantly lean on the sill and whistle Louie Armstrong numbers into empty space. Dr. Wan was a big believer in “testing the anxiety,” in steadily diminishing its power by confronting it. But a sixth-floor office was one thing and a platform of smoke located almost two miles above the ground was another.
He wondered what Dr. Wan would’ve made of his plan to attempt skydiving. He hadn’t told her because he suspected she would be skeptical of his ability to do it, and he didn’t want skepticism. Besides, if he told her he was going to jump out of a plane, she would’ve asked why, and he would’ve had to say something about Harriet, and for the purposes of therapy he was over his Harriet fantasies.
He turned and considered his four-poster bed of cloud, his coatrack, and his likely fate.